Students Meet Campus Meat

Ever wonder where the food you’re eating is coming from? Well, I have, which is one reason I recently sat down to talk to Andrew Castellon, the head of Chartwells at Pace University in Pleasantville, and Tyrone Ellen, the head of Chartwells for the New York City campus. Chartwells is the food service for all the Pace University campuses, and hundreds of others across the country.

My prime question was who supplies the food? It turns out, not surprisingly, that there are many, many steps between the grilled chicken in our cafeterias and a living bird.

While speaking to Mr. Castellon I found out that Chartwells is a division of Compass Group North America and that they are split into two units, K-12 and higher education. I was told that Compass Group inspects all suppliers before it buys their food products. But Mr. Castellon said he couldn’t be specific about other issues, such as policies related to the treatment of livestock and poultry.

In my meeting in New York City with Mr. Ellen, I asked if Chartwells requires its suppliers to treat animals with care. At first Mr. Ellen told me that some suppliers will post that they do, but said he wasn’t sure if they all do. A few minutes later he shifted to saying he could verify if this was a requirement or not.

He said that Chartwells’s top concern is sustainability, but when asked how much of the supplied food came from CAFOs, he said that he did not know and would talk to Compass Group. (Yet more evidence that the word sustainability has little meaning on its own.)

Our goal is to work with Chartwells, not to fight them. My interviews with both Mr. Castellon and Mr. Ellen were helpful and informative.

These meetings will help our team move on to the next step of our project, boosting campus interest in developing robust standards for food quality and animal welfare.

1 Comment

Ellie
on May 29, 2014 at 7:25 pm

This is tagged with “animal welfare”.

Animal products are unnecessary, since all the nutrients we get from animals can be obtained from plants. I would consider living in a cage and getting killed at an early age the exact opposite of “welfare”.

Given this, would you want to work with Chartwell at all? Why not just stop eating other animals? Why does Pace act like the desire of humans to feel a certain taste in their mouth is more important than the desire of an animal to not be in pain, to not be killed, and to have autonomy over its own body?

Apparently Pace has a pledge that reads: “I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of the choices I make in my daily life as well as in any job I consider. I will try to improve these aspects at home and with any organization for which I work.”

If needlessly ending a life for the reason of “i like the taste lol” is consistent with “taking into account the social…consequences of choices” then we might as well just do away with the pledge, because it’s meaningless. If Pace actually thinks it’s not acting in complete contradiction of the values it praises on paper, then the policy it promotes is just thoughtless selfishness. And that doesn’t really need a pledge, does it? If you wanna achieve that, just don’t think about your actions, simple as that. No pledge required.

But if Pace agrees with what I’m saying – that killing an animal for needless selfish needs is the opposite of what it promotes, then LET’S STOP! Stop “working” with Chartwel, and partner up with a vegan catering company.

What makes this even worse though, is that Pace is already doing business with Chartwell even though up until this interview Chartwell wasn’t even sure if the animals Pace buys through them are treated with “care”, however low their standard of “care” even is. So even if Pace was to make the claim that “no, no, see, killing someone and caring for them are totally exactly the same thing! So we can care for an animal and then kill them because someone likes the taste of their meat! Killing = caring. Like, these words are so similar, we use them interchangeably!” they would still be in the wrong because Chartwell doesn’t even know if these animals are getting additionally abused before they are killed.

Question yourselves. Why do you chose to eat animals? You probably never made a conscious “choice”, did you? Most people are raised with the belief that “it’s not a meal if there isn’t a corpse of a tortured animal on my plate!”. But now that I’ve brought it up, how can you NOT question yourself? How can you forget that you have a CHOICE? And if that choice is not necessary, how can you go on justifying it?